Rock, paper, scissors is ostensibly a game of chance. But players can deploy different strategies to win -- and in one game between two auction houses, millions of dollars were at stake.
The rival auction houses approached the impending game very differently. Kanae Ishibashi, the then president of Christie's in Japan, took the challenge seriously. She studied the psychology of the game and phoned a friend: She consulted 11-year-olds Alice and Flora Maclean, the twin daughters of Nicholas Maclean, the international director of Christie's Impressionist and modern art department at the time, figuring they'd have more expertise on the playground ritual than she.
Sotheby's, on the other hand, believed the game would come down to chance,"so we didn't really give it that much thought," Blake Koh, a former specialist in the house's Los Angeles office, said at the time, also speaking to the Times ."We had no strategy in mind."On game day, Ishibashi met her Sotheby's competitor in a board room.
The game, it turned out, was not as arbitrary as Sotheby's had believed. Chegg, a homework help company, has since the situation as an example of game theory. The website's framing of the quandary suggests that students create a payoff matrix that assumes a firm's"dominant strategy" is"to always choose scissors."Or, as Alice Maclean told NPR a decade after she'd given Ishibashi the same advice:"You never go paper ... It's a weak move."
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